How to Draw Anime & Game Characters, Vol. 1: Basics for Beginners and Beyond

Best of all, Ozawa starts from the very basics, and urges you to do the exercises from the beginning. Sure, drawing cubes isn't exciting, but even for a non-beginners, it's a useful warm-up that improves technique. With the reassuring statement "if you can hold a pencil and draw straight lines, you can draw, " he skillfully leads the reader to develop or improve drawing skills.

He also includes something I've never seen in a comics manual before: Drawings from different ability levels. He shows stuff by absolute beginers, intermediate, advanced and professional and critiques the problems and positives. Personally, I found this extremely helpful and reassuring. He also marks the time it took to create some of the professional drawings: Again, very reassuring that these things took time and weren't dashed off in minutes.

Finally, Ozawa covers a broad range of character styles, from generally realistic to the SD (simple deformed) type. For each, he includes plenty of detail on what makes such characters work and why.

These books can be hard to find, so if you're interested in this subject, don't wait. Get your copy now.

I made a drawing of a kitty girl with the instructions the book gives you...*can't imagine all the critiques she would get from the author* But anyway, the book tells you to compare your drawings with other drawings, and it takes you think: "Man, I used to draw like THAT?" At least that's how I did...lol

One of the things I loved about this book was that the author shows us these drawings made from 100% Amateurs, Intermediate *sp* and Advanced artists, plus proffessional versions of the drawings. It tells you WHAT'S wrong with the drawings, the errors etc. And that helps ALOT because these drawings have very common errors.

May I add that the mascots are, hmm how do I put this...KAWAII?! (japanese for cute...heh) The author uses these adorable mascots that briefly explain you things like "We must learn the basics!"; that adds humor to the book, and that alone made me more confident of myself, and killed the thought of "Oh it'll probably be too hard for me". But let me tell you, if you put your heart and time to it, and practice with this book, you'll be a kick-arse anime artist in no time! And remember, if your first straight line comes out horrible, don't worry, by time you'll get it right, because practice makes perfect =3 If you plan on becoming an anime artist or illustrator or whatever, thi book MUST be on your bookshelf, you won't regret it. ^_^

One quibble and that is not enough to bring down my rating, some of the translation is obscure (fringe for bangs, etc.) but you can usually figure out what was meant.

This book is well worth it if you enjoy anime.

Unfortunately, this still isn't the "Ultimate How to Draw Manga" book, I don't think it exists yet, but this comes very close. I've been drawing for over 20 years now, so I don't need some steps that I think beginners would benefit from, that never seem to make it into these "how to" books.

I felt a twang of discomfort seeing the pictures in this one, going by it's ratings, my style falls somewhere in between "intermediate" and "very close but..." levels and not the "pro" level, but perhaps with some of the lessons in this book, I'll finally cross that threshold!

The art is beautiful, looking like a cross between Disney and manga, it illustrates several different genres, and has pages and pages of examples of each "type" of character. Lots of "how to draw guys" too, which is a subject often ignored in "how to" books and tutorials.

I highly recommend this book, even for the "non-beginner," it has lots to show!

It's not a step by step "how to draw" book as you would first think, it's rather a book on "test and learn", for example it shows a variety of characters and tells things like "separated eyes express lonelines, the small mouth expresses a delicate nature", so this book will only teach you how to design plain characters and it's wonderful for beginners like me; In no way must be considered a complete "How to Draw Anime" lesson, but its perfect for start cooking, even if you don't even know how to hold your pencil (that was my case some months ago when I bought it).

If you're a complete beginner buy this book, I gave it 5 stars because it helped me a lot, but keep this mind: drawing characters is one thing, to give life to them is something else... for that buy the Volume 2, or do some research.